She stopped him with a gesture full of dignity and sweetness. "That life is gone forever,--it is thousands of miles and ages on ages away. It is a world more distant than the stars, and we are nearer to Heaven than to it.... It is strange to think how we have drifted, you and I, to this rock. A year ago we had never seen each other's faces, had never heard each other's names, and yet you were coming to this rock from prison and over seas, and I was coming to meet you.... And it is our death place, and we will die together, and to-morrow maybe the little birds will cover us with leaves as they did the children in the story. They were brother and sister.... When our time comes I will not be afraid, for I will be with you ... my brother." Landless covered his face with his hands. The shadows grew longer and the cloud castles began to flush rosily, though the sun still rode above the tree tops. A purple light filled the aisles of the forest, through which a herd of deer, making for some accustomed lick, passed like a phantom troop. They vanished, and from out the stillness of the glades came the sudden, startled barking of a fox. A shadow darted across a sunlit alley from gloom to gloom, paused on the outskirts of the wood below the crags while one might count ten, then turned and flitted back into the darkness from whence it came. They beneath the crags did not see it. Suddenly Landless raised his head. Upon his face was the look of one who has come through much doubt and anguish of spirit to an immutable resolve. He looked to the priming of his gun and laid it upon the rock beside him, together with his powderhorn and pouch of bullets. Raising himself to his knees he gazed long and intently into the forest below. There was no sign of danger. On the checkered ground beneath two mighty oaks squirrels were playing together like frolicsome kittens, and through the clear air came the tapping of a woodpecker. The forest was silent as to the shadow that had flitted through it. It can keep a secret very well. Landless sank back against the rock. He had lost much blood, and that and the pain of his mangled foot turned him faint and sick for minutes at a time. He clenched his teeth and forced back the deadly faintness, then turned to the woman who stood beside him, her hands clasped before her, her eyes following the declining sun, her lips sometimes set in mournful curves, sometimes murmuring broken and inaudible words of prayer. He called her twice before she answered, turning to him with eyes of feverish splendor which saw and yet saw not. "What is it?" she asked dreamily. "Come back to earth, madam," he said. "There is that that I wish to say to you. Listen to me kindly and pitifully, as to a dying man." "I am listening," she answered. "What is it?"